


Letters to the Void

by VividlyLost



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Child Abuse, Gaster - Freeform, Growing Up, Oneshot, Short Story, friends - Freeform, platonic, reader is a young girl, therapeutic writing, written in first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 14:09:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11292273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VividlyLost/pseuds/VividlyLost
Summary: "When I was younger I had a friend that no one knew about.  I would write them letters."





	Letters to the Void

**Author's Note:**

> This came about when I woke up in the middle of the night with the title in my head. Later when I started to write it turned into a rather therapeutic experience for me. I showed it to a very amazing person, [FireflyKisses](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FireflyKisses/pseuds/FireflyKisses), who read through it and gave me some wonderful feedback so I could edit it properly before posting it here. While there are kernels of truth within this story it it, still a story. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it.

            When I was younger I had a friend that no one knew about.  I would write them letters.  

 

            My family moved a lot so it was hard for me to connect to children of my age and when I was in school, the ones I did took advantage of my eager to please attitude.  If I did make a friend we always ended up moving again.  Cell Phones and instant messengers weren’t a common thing then either so once I lost contact that was it.  I was lonely as a child and looking back on it now I was pretty unhappy.  

 

            My mother remarried when I was very little and her new husband seemed ok at first but she tells me now that I always acted like I knew he was bad news, like I had a sense for the kind of person he was.  Of course I thought it was my fault. He stopped working a while into the marriage so she had to work extra to make ends meet and it was up to me to keep out of trouble and take care of my half brother.  If I didn’t work hard enough, or didn’t stop crying, or didn’t take care of his parental duties then I was worthless and many nights my mother came home to me crying over a half packed suitcase because I had been told to pack and go live with my birth father.  This happened a lot and after everything I became angry, but for some reason I never once thought of running away.  

 

            Instead I wrote letters detailing what happened and how I felt, or lost myself in my books.

 

            I never expected my letters to be answered, I didn’t really address them to a real place and my handwriting was horrendous, but after the third letter I found one inside my book addressed to “The Lonely Girl”.  I was maybe around eight when I read that first letter.  The handwriting in it was neat and well spaced but reading through them now it looks like the author took special care to have it look that way.  The letter was rather formal and yet oddly familiar in the way the author responded to the tear stained letters I had written.  The author made an effort to comfort me, telling me that no child was worthless and no child should ever have to do the job of the parent.  Their words filled almost three pages of paper and occasionally slipped into words and phrases I didn’t understand, but all the same I was happier than I had been in years.  My childish heart had me calling this mysterious author a friend after only one letter and immediately I hid it and set about writing a response.  I tried to write more neatly in this one and I thanked them and asked them questions.  Who were they?  How did they get my letters?  What did they do?  I asked them a lot of questions about themselves and more besides.  I came to learn that they were a he and he was lost and lonely as well.  My letters, well they were as much a surprise to him as his were to me.  

 

            When we moved again, as inevitable as the changing seasons, I anxiously fretted that my new friend wouldn’t receive my letters anymore.  I needn’t have worried though, as always they continued to appear inside my favorite book no matter where I was! 

 

            Over the following years we corresponded and I filled a small shoe box with his letters.  I wrote maybe once a week, sometimes only a few times a month after that first month; it all depended on what was going on in my life. I wanted to have things to talk about when I wrote and his responses were always encouraging, asking me about my hobbies and what books I liked to read.  He asked how my brother was doing, my mother, about school.  Sometimes he would even help with a tough homework problem, revealing he was a very intelligent person and incredibly kind.  Sometimes, when I was punished and left in my room crying I would write small notes to ‘my friend’, telling him what happened and asking him what I did wrong this time.  His responses were always immediate, a hurried note, sloppier than his normal letters, telling me that I did nothing wrong. His rushed words that filled the page in concern were like a warm hug that consoled me until the tears stop.  

 

            Eventually I got used to being in trouble, not that that seemed to make ‘my friend’ happy but at least along with my stoney acceptance of the punishments I got better at learning to avoid the situations that caused them.  

 

            My brother never got in trouble. I was the oldest and I wasn’t even my stepfathers daughter by blood so I guess there was a bias there.  At the time that fact didn’t really make much of a difference to me in my situation but now, I am glad he didn’t have to go through what I did.  He was so young.  A large part of me hopes he doesn’t remember those years of our life at all.  Luckily he and I get along decently well now but I think, and if I am being honest with myself, that when I got older I resented being made to babysit him.  Perhaps after the years his father was in our lives all I just wanted was to be able to be alone, without the responsibility of being the older sibling anymore.  I got really short tempered with my brother, especially when he hit his own moody, pubescent years, but despite it all, and despite our past I wouldn’t give him up for anything. 

 

            The only solace I had from my home life was my nearly annual summer trips up the country to my grandparents.  It was quiet and there were no kids up there for me to play with, but they made sure I was happy.  I didn’t tell them about ‘my friend’, and summers were the only time I couldn’t really write him.  I had to leave my favorite book at home during my trips. It was a little outside of the religious bubble of what was allowed with my grandparents, but I would write a letter or two while I was gone.  As always, he never failed to get them.

 

            Then one day when I was around ten I had to leave.  Me and my brother were being shipped off to live with relatives I didn’t really know, in a house that was already at capacity, because something had happened at home.  I was afraid my mother or stepfather would find my shoebox of letters and I remember panicking.  My friend consoled me, he told me that it would be ok, and when I told him if the letters were found that I would get in more trouble than I had before he only told me not to worry.  I couldn’t take many of my things with me when I left but I promised to write.  

 

            It wasn’t bad where I was going, despite the cramped living situation and I did make a friend in the neighborhood.  I laughed more and climbed trees and bemoaned the strict uniforms of the school I was sent to.  I missed my mother, but more than anything I was glad to be free.  Social Services visited me occasionally while I stayed with my relatives and I can’t really remember what they spoke to me about.  I think it was really just a lot of pointless conversations because it wasn’t until me and my brother moved back with my mother and stepfather that I think anyone realized they had been asking the wrong questions. 

 

            I don’t even know how they figured it out, I didn’t speak openly of the inner workings of my childhood to anyone but ‘my friend’, but there came a day when I was taken out of class and asked a series of questions.  Now that I think about it I can’t remember if I was sad or angry or even emotionally cold that day, but I answered and I gave them details as they asked for them.  

 

            Turns out my mother didn’t know what had been going on.  ‘My friend’ had once asked me if I ever spoke to my mother about what was happening while she was gone and I had responded that she was there the day I was thrown to the floor against the egg crate. It had left me with large bloody scrapes on my leg that I was made to lie about at school, and that she was often there when he yelled and took out the belt.  To my child eyes I assumed she knew and just didn’t care and I told ‘my friend’ as much.  He didn’t push the issue.  Of course, she wasn’t a bad person.  When I wasn’t allowed food she snuck me twizzlers and she always told me she loved me.  While she didn’t know what I was going through I guess the same could be said about me for her.  I was a child though. I don’t really remember if he ever physically hurt her too, it is a subject I try not to bring up nowadays, but the fights and the yelling, I remember those. The day it all came to a head though everything changed. 

 

            When it all came out things moved quickly.  I finished elementary school and my stepfather was taken away.  Quickly, we moved away to a small home and yet another new school.  The first year there I kept to myself pretty much but there were kids in my neighborhood my age and my letters to ‘my friend’ slowly changed in tone. 

 

            Life was better, maybe not one hundred percent, but more than it had been.  I took up music and drawing and would excitedly tell ‘my friend’ about my new friends and the trips I took with the school band.  Sometimes I would include little doodles when I would get off topic during my letters, but he never seemed to mind.  I stayed at this school the longest I ever had, long enough to develop friendships with classmates that actually lasted and long enough for my pubescent hormones to have me wishing I was old enough to date.  Through it all, my friend was a steadfast rock; the broken hearts, the anger at teachers, the wild fantasies of adventure that I would write out while on the bus from school and the older I got, the more he adjusted his way of writing to keep up with me.  

 

            I realized at some point that he was probably a lot older than I was and never once did I think to ask him how old.  When I finally did ask him once he told me that where he was time was an irrelevant concept, but if I had to know he was definitely older than I was.  It made things a little awkward for me at the time, knowing that this friend of mine who knew all my secrets and my low moments was so much older than I was.  I don’t know why it bothered me, maybe I had hoped he was my age like a well learned boy that was trapped in his own world and was growing up with me.  Thinking back on it now, I knew that was ridiculous of me. The signs had been there all along. 

 

            As I neared the end of middle school I slowly stopped writing to ‘my friend’ and my mother remarried to a good man.  I was your average teenager and thought I was atypical.  I was moody, and grumpy and when I changed schools right after starting high school I was downright vile, but I was growing up.  I made mistakes, I made friends, I kept friends, lost friends, and I looked forward to life outside of the small town I was living in.  There was always a dull, guilty ache when I thought of ‘my friend’ and I would contemplate writing him again, but then I would get wrapped up in my young life.  While I never really made the kind of friends you would hang out with on a regular basis, I was more or less content.  Occasionally I would write snippets of letters, describing something that had happened, what I thought of someone at school, new hobbies and music, embarrassing moments and funny ones, but I never finished them.  I would forget about them and they would disappear into the mess in my room.  

 

            Throughout my life I never told any of my tangible friends about ‘him’, they would probably have told me I was crazy.  It wasn’t like it hadn’t crossed my own mind on occasion;  The thought that maybe I was writing the letters myself. I once got really into a show about mental patients and  found myself questioning my own sanity and memories as I compared my own experiences to those I watched on the screen.  It was a secret I kept to myself, but the one thing I couldn’t explain was the fact that if it was all in my head then why didn’t I know what he looked like.  He never told me even when I asked him, he avoided those questions like the plague so even when I tried to imagine what he might look like I couldn’t figure it out.  He had to be real if I couldn’t supply myself with that information.  Right?  

 

            When I graduated and started packing for college I found the shoebox of letters again deep in a trunk with my stuffed animals. I stared at the sacred tome of my past, overcome with nostalgia. What followed was me sitting there on the floor for hours reading through the words my friend had sent me, all of his kindness and encouragement, the gentle admonitions, praise and reassurance.  I lovingly combed over the stories from his life and aimless conversations from one mysterious man to a, then, lost and lonely child.  I cried that day.  He had helped me through so much and been so kind to me and in the onset of my teenage selfishness I had taken him for granted.  I wrote a long letter that night, filling up so many pages that I almost wondered if I should have just typed it all up.  It wasn’t like my handwriting had improved much over the years, but I took care to make it legible.  I felt like after everything keeping my letter handwritten was so much more personal and I felt it oddly necessary.  I wrote about everything.  I asked how he was and told him about my aspirations.  I wondered if he would actually receive this massive letter, if he was even still there.  Wherever he was. I asked him to forgive me for not writing to him in years.  I made plenty of excuses and promptly tore my them apart in my guilt, but in the end I told him I was sorry and I hoped he was doing ok because I was growing up and I was doing fine.  I told him I missed him.

 

            I packed up a small box with books that night, stowing the shoebox of letters in with them and when I unpacked the box in my dorm room I placed it, along with my favorite book, on the desk side by side.  Over the first semester I wrote a few more letters to my friend, hoping he was still out there.  For weeks, none came. 

 

            Then one day I sat down after a long day, fingers caked in charcoal and frustrated at the rules that governed art as a concept and my inability to grasp them, when I noticed that the book was stuffed full with carefully folded sheets of paper.  My eyes pricked with grateful tears and I ripped the pages from the middle of the book.  Sheets upon sheets of paper addressed to “The Not So Lonely Girl”.  I laughed joyfully and choked on a sob as I realized that my friend was alright.  

 

_             My Dear, _

 

_             I am so very glad to hear from you again, after all of these years.  I am so proud of you, of who you have become and who you will yet be.  Even from your letters I can see how much you have grown as a person.  You are so incredibly strong.  Never believe you are anything less than extraordinary.  You have experienced things in life no should ever have to, especially one as young as you were, but you came out of it all with a fierceness I could only have hoped for you to achieve--- _

 

_             ---and my dear, please know that I am not mad at you.  I never once doubted that you were alright and living the life you deserved with a family that you deserved.  If you are worried about me then don’t be, I am the same as ever and I will always forgive you.  Remember, I am more proud of you than you will ever know and I am as I always have been and always will be, your friend. _

 

            I wish I could meet him.  I wish I could thank him in person, but I’m not sure if that’s possible.  

 

            Because you see, I have a friend that no one knows about.  I write him letters that disappear from inside my book.  I address them to ‘the Void’.  


End file.
